NBA 75: At No. 29, John Havlicek's endless energy and versatility made him a Celtics great and Hall of Famer (2024)

(Editor’s note: Welcome back toThe Athletic NBA 75. We’re re-running our top 40 players to count down every day from Sept. 8-Oct. 17, the day before the opening of the 2022-23NBA season. This piece was first published on Jan. 11, 2022.)

Rick Weitzman, stuck in the worst type of traffic, heard a knock on his windshield. John Havlicek wanted to grab his attention.

Even Boston, usually prepared for a winter storm, was caught off guard by substantial snow in the middle of November. Cars were in gridlock. The two Celtics players, stuck on the Tobin Bridge, needed to make it to the Boston Garden in time for a game. The way the roads were configured in 1967, Weitzman said, the drive would have taken about five minutes under normal traffic conditions. But on this night, travel was stopped.

“The clock (to game time) was moving,” Weitzman said. “And I wasn’t.”

Havlicek had an idea. He couldn’t risk missing the start of a contest with the San Francisco Warriors. His wife, Beth, was in their car a handful of paces behind Weitzman, but Havlicek knew he couldn’t afford to stay with her. He would find his way to the arena.

Snow surrounded Havlicek. The night shivered from the cold. The arena sat about two miles away. But he couldn’t stay trapped inside a stationary car.

“I can’t wait,” Havlicek told Weitzman. “I’m going to run in.”

Weitzman eventually followed suit. After finally getting past the tolls, he pulled his car over and decided to make his dash for the arena. He made it just before game time, but the run to the gym sapped him of all his energy. He said it was the only time in his life he felt happy not to get into the game. Havlicek played 30 minutes in the 113-110 win. He racked up 16 points, seven assists and seven rebounds while contributing his usual tireless defense.

“He could have played the whole game,” Weitzman said.

Throughout Havlicek’s Hall of Fame career, teammates marveled at his dependability, mental toughness and physical endurance. They say he never wanted to pick up a full check at dinner but paid in full whenever he stepped onto a basketball court.

He joined the Celtics as a rookie from a highly successful college program, evolved into one of the NBA’s great sixth men and grew into the franchise’s all-time leading scorer. He was “Hondo,” a nickname he picked up after a John Wayne movie by that title. He was a giant in Boston sports and NBA history. Havlicek, who is No. 29 on The Athletic’s NBA 75, just never saw himself that way. With endless humility, he stood as the bridge from the Bill Russell era to the Celtics’ next championship team, a steady hand who set the tone for Dave Cowens and a new generation of Boston players, and a clutch leader ready for any type of moment.

“We used to say, if you want to be a great player, you’ve gotta have All-Star talent and play like an All-Star all the time,” Cowens said. “You don’t take nights off. You set the pace. And John was like that. And he was consistent with that for 16 years. That is pretty incredible.”

Havlicek’s approach toward team sprints explained a lot to Cowens.

Cowens said after practices bigs would race against bigs. Littles would race against littles. A 6-foot-9 center who burned with competitiveness, Cowens wanted to outsprint everyone, even the guards. The winners would be spared from further sprints. Everyone else would keep running. Cowens always wanted to take down the first race and be done with his conditioning duties.

Not Havlicek.

“He didn’t want to win and not have to run anymore,” Cowens said. “So he ran at his own pace.”

Havlicek wanted to keep running. He ran to eight NBA championships, 13 All-Star Games, 11 All-NBA teams (including four First Team), eight All-Defensive teams (five First Team) and the 1974 NBA Finals MVP award.

Before all that, he almost veered toward football instead. The Cleveland Browns drafted him in the seventh round of the 1962 NFL Draft. Havlicek joined the team for training camp and preseason that year before eventually being named one of the final cuts. He made it that far even though he hadn’t played college football, sticking around because of his athleticism and toughness.

Those around Havlicek think he could have picked up any type of sport. Before shifting to basketball, he also played baseball at Ohio State, hitting over .400 as a freshman. Cowens believes Havlicek could have also excelled at track, especially in the 800-meter race or the mile.

“He was the best natural athlete I have ever come in contact with,” Weitzman said.

Havlicek used to say he had oversized lungs. He also shared with some teammates that his heart rate was abnormally low.

“And he could run just about all day long without sweating, without really feeling what a lot of other players feel,” said former Celtics teammate Satch Sanders. “I remember sometimes we’d talk about that. I’d say, hey John, you’re gifted as an athlete. Don’t be looking at everybody else and expecting them to run with you. Because that’s not going to happen.”

Sanders said he only saw one other player with a similar style: Hall of Famer Bill Bradley. Outside of that, Sanders said, Havlicek was one of one.

When he first joined the Celtics in 1962, he wasn’t known as a scorer but had a history of winning. At Ohio State, Havlicek’s teams went 78-6 and reached the national championship game in all three years, winning one title (players needed to play one year of freshman basketball back then). Those teams were loaded with talent. Jerry Lucas went on to reach seven All-Star Games in a Hall of Fame career. Larry Siegfried won five NBA championships as Havlicek’s Celtics teammate. Bobby Knight never emerged as a standout player but became one of the most successful college coaches ever. By the time Havlicek arrived in Boston, he knew how to thrive alongside great players.

Good thing he did. The Celtics had already started a dynasty by the time Havlicek showed up as the ninth pick in the 1962 NBA Draft. Like he always did, he hit the ground running.

“He would just keep running,” Sanders said. “Running around in circles. And just wearing people out. Sometimes they were maybe a step behind. And if you’re a step behind John Havlicek, you might as well be way behind because he was going to get that shot off easily and he’s going to go all the way to the basket. And he just was able to keep moving. That’s an asset in basketball.

“In those days, you had a specific point guard that was busy looking for a player like Havlicek when he just kept moving. Because he could keep moving, he was going to get layup after layup, he was going to outrun most of the guys playing against him.”

Hank Finkel, a Celtics center from 1969-1975, said the team would start each practice with 20 minutes of fast break drills to hone the organization’s preferred style.

“John would run 100 miles per hour at the beginning of practice,” Finkel said. “And he was still running 100 miles per hour at the end of practice. And he very seldom broke a sweat. His body wasn’t normal.”

Havlicek, who made the all-rookie team in 1963, wasn’t always moving. As the wing’s roommate on the road for several years, Sanders shared plenty of calmer moments with Havlicek. Sanders learned that Havlicek loved television, especially light comedies, but typically avoided discussing serious topics like politics or race.

“He didn’t want to talk about controversial subjects,” Sanders said.

So Sanders would play jokes on Havlicek. Sanders would wait until about 11 o’clock or midnight when Havlicek would fall asleep. Then, as his friend tried to fall into the dream world, Sanders would launch into soliloquies from across the room. He would talk about politics, women and gossip rumors, all the stuff he knew would irritate Havlicek the most. Havlicek would bury his head in the pillow, put his hands over his ears and try to block it all out, but Sanders would keep going.

“He would really get angry and make a lot of noise,” Sanders recalled. “‘Satch, leave me alone! I don’t want to talk!’ And I would just keep on talking. Just for about a half an hour, just to mess with him because I knew how much he hated it.”

Friends play games like that. Friends also go out to dinner together. With Havlicek, that could be an adventure.

“He was very frugal,” Cowens said.

No matter how many of the Celtics players would eat together, Havlicek wanted them all to split the bill evenly.

“So if it came out to $17.73, he would break it down so that somehow you had to come up with the right amount,” Sanders said. “He would ask you for the exact change and if you didn’t get it he would call a waitress over and they would have to go through and get change for a quarter, whatever.

“He was very tight in terms of the expenses. Extraordinarily tight. That was the only bad thing you could say about him: his tightness as far as the dollars were concerned. He was a pain in the ass when it was time to go out because you knew it would take so long to figure out the check.”

Havlicek was always on time. He had a routine. He was meticulous about most things, including his shaving kit.

“He knew just where everything was supposed to be,” Finkel said. “The shaving cream, the deodorant, everything.”

One day, just to mess with Havlicek, Finkel reorganized the contents of the kit. After Havlicek took out the shaving cream to use it, Finkel slid an empty co*ke can into its place. Finkel knew the prank would drive Havlicek mad. Sure enough, Havlicek fired the co*ke can at Finkel.

Though they liked to have fun with Havlicek from time to time, teammates knew they could depend on him. Cowens said he never heard anyone say a bad word about his beloved teammate. Weitzman, who only played with the Celtics for one season, said most veterans shied away from the rookies at training camp because they didn’t want to establish a friendship with a player unlikely to stick in town. Havlicek took Weitzman under his wing immediately, offering tips and support.

“His compassion really stood out,” said Weitzman.

Added Cowens: “He was just an honest guy, a moral guy, a humble guy, he liked to help people. He was a good father, a good husband. Like Red (Auerbach) said, if I had a son, I’d want him to be John Havlicek. That says it all.”

The way Cowens sees it, the 1970s Celtics live in a forgotten corner of franchise history. He believes when people celebrate the greatest Boston teams ever, they too often jump straight from the Russell era to the days of Larry Bird and eventually Kevin Garnett.

“I don’t know why it is,” Cowens said. “But the ’70s in the NBA, with the media, and even I watch the Celtics when they advertise the game, very seldom do you see them have any players from the ’70s: Havlicek, JoJo (White) and myself. They go right from Russell to Bird to Garnett. And they kind of pass us over. And I’m not quite sure why that is.”

Though other teams may be more widely discussed, Cowens believes some of the 1970s Celtics teams could have matched up against any team in league history. He joined the franchise at the outset of the decade, just one season after Russell’s and Sam Jones’s retirement left an enormous void on the roster. The year before Cowens’s rookie season of 1970-71, the Celtics went just 34-48. Considering they had won 11 championships in the 13 previous seasons, that qualified as a precipitous drop.

But the Celtics still had Havlicek, Sanders and Don Nelson to supply tested veteran leadership. Even among the other presences, Cowens said Havlicek stood out as the “elder statesman” pushing the franchise back toward championship caliber. He was the captain but didn’t always say much.

“Nobody was really a big talker about anything,” Cowens said. “But when he got upset with us, when we made rookie mistakes and all that stuff, then he’d go into a little tirade. Then that was it. But it was usually short-lived. I remember one time Hank Finkel was on one side of him, he was at the locker right next to John and I was on the other side. So John went and he went off and used 16 cuss words right after one another – just cuss words, no other words. Then he’d say, ‘Stupid.’ And Hank looked over and said, ‘Are you finished?’ But that was the kind of locker room we had. Hank Finkel would not let anybody get too full of himself. Neither would John or anyone else.”

By the time Cowens joined the team, Havlicek had already made one of the most memorable plays in NBA history. In Game 7 of the 1965 Eastern Division finals, with the Celtics ahead by one point in the closing seconds, Russell had lost control of an inbounds pass after the ball made contact with a wire coming off the backboard. The mistake gave the ball back to Wilt Chamberlain and the 76ers with a chance to go to another NBA Finals. Tommy Heinsohn later said he believed Philadelphia screwed up by calling a timeout. That gave Russell a chance to ask his teammates to get him off the hook. Havlicek answered the call.

“Havlicek stole the ball!” radio announcer Johnny Most called out in his raspy voice. “It’s all over! It’s all over!”

Celtics fans were so mad with joy that they ripped off Havlicek’s jersey in the celebration. Though that was his most famous big play, he made a habit out of delivering them, as Cowens found out. He believes Havlicek’s unrivaled conditioning gave him an advantage in the highest-leverage moments. Cowens compared the legend’s mental toughness to LeBron James’s.

“I know that at the end of a game, (Havlicek) didn’t play like he was tired,” Cowens said. “I’d have to say that was one of his traits: He always had a clear mind about what to do. When you get tired, sometimes it’s hard to concentrate because you’re breathing hard and you’re not getting oxygen every place. But he never had that problem. He was always clear-headed no matter what was going on.”

Havlicek always had gas in the tank. He played at least 71 regular-season games in every campaign of his career. He appeared in at least 80 regular-season games in 11 of his 16 seasons. He led the league in minutes played twice, averaging more than 45 minutes per game in each of those years. During the 1968 Finals, Havlicek played 291 of a possible 293 minutes. He would have played every second of the series, but he fouled out of one game and subbed out of another with the game in hand.

They weren’t easy minutes, either. Havlicek did everything on the court. Well, almost everything.

“Very seldom did you see John going left,” said Cowens. “Even when he went left, he was dribbling with his right hand.”

Cowens marveled at some of the clutch shots Havlicek hit. In Game 6 of the 1974 NBA Finals, he forced overtime with a long jumper, forced double overtime with a putback bucket and gave the Celtics a one-point lead with seven seconds left in double overtime. In Game 5 of the 1976 Finals, the first triple-overtime game in Finals history, Havlicek drilled a leaning runner to give his team a lead in the second overtime. It would have held up as the winner, but the Suns’ Gar Heard responded with an incredible shot of his own before the Celtics eventually captured the marathon victory. At age 35, in an era when few players lasted until then, Havlicek averaged 41 minutes per game in that series.

According to Finkel, Havlicek would regularly tell teammates, “You’re only as tired as you think you are.”

“When you played with John, you played the same style as him,” Finkel said. “You ran.”

Heinsohn, who took over as the head coach before the 1969-70 season, preached capitalizing on fast breaks whenever possible, much like what Red Auerbach had done before him. With Cowens in the middle, White at guard and Havlicek on the wing, those teams had the personnel to beat teams up and down the court. And they did. Over and over and over. When Cowens grabbed a rebound, he wouldn’t look to throw an outlet pass directly to Havlicek or White. He would fire it beyond them, forcing his teammates to chase after the ball.

“I loved the running part,” Cowens said. “I was right along with John. I would run as fast as I could to keep up with him. And I think I pushed him some too. Because when I got the ball, I was releasing it, we were fast breaking it. I loved that style. He and I worked well together.”

Well enough to reestablish the Celtics as a force in the post-Russell years. The Celtics won the NBA Finals in 1974 and ’76, but the franchise’s best team of the decade fell short of that goal. During the 1972-73 season, Havlicek dislocated his right shoulder in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals after the Celtics won a franchise-record 68 regular-season games. After sitting out Game 4, Cowens has said, Havlicek effectively played the rest of the Eastern Conference finals with his left arm.

“Yeah,” said Finkel. “He scored 18 (in Game 5) with his left hand. That goes to tell you how great he was, you know?”

Despite Havlicek’s gritty effort, he was limited throughout the final three games of the series. The Celtics fell to the eventual NBA champion New York Knicks in seven games, leaving behind a haunting what-if.

“There’s not too many (teams) that only lost 14 (games),” Cowens said. “I would take that team – any team from ’72 to ’76 – I would say nobody was going to sweep us in a seven-game series. I guarantee you that. Anybody. I don’t care who they were. If I look at matchups with the Bird-McHale era, the Garnett era, the Lakers, the Bulls, anybody, I think we had the tools and the discipline and the skill sets to compete with any of those.”

Havlicek made either the First or Second Team All-NBA during each of the first seven seasons of the post-Russell era, paving a new way forward for a franchise that had only experienced championship success with the defensive genius in town. After the Celtics won the title in 1974, the franchise’s first banner without Russell, Havlicek walked around the locker room to thank and hug his teammates. It had been five years since Russell retired. It had been a journey for Havlicek, who experienced the low of missing the playoffs in 1970 before climbing back to the top.

“This is the greatest one,” he told his teammates, according to The New York Times.

Because Havlicek and the Celtics had needed to uncover a new way. And they had. From Milwaukee, where they had just captured Game 7, the players called a restaurant in Saugus, Mass. they frequently visited after games. When the Celtics landed in Massachusetts, they had a table full of champagne and food waiting for them at Kowloon.

It’s stressful to encapsulate the greatness of a legend. It’s even more stressful after Cowens, the 1973 MVP, gives an order.

“Do a good job for John,” he said.

Even now, years after Havlicek passed away in April 2019, teammates want the best for him. They saw how badly he wanted to win, how diligently he prepared to play all those minutes and how much focus he carried every step of the way. They saw how slip-ups weighed on Havlicek, who Hinkel considered a perfectionist. If a player on Havlicek’s team was supposed to run to a spot in the middle of the court, said Finkel, “He better be there.”

“He couldn’t tolerate mistakes,” Sanders said. “Not couldn’t tolerate them. He would just scream into a towel during a timeout when someone had made a mistake and did not run the play correctly. He did not confront anyone, but he would scream into a towel. And we knew that he was thinking curse words, thinking awful things, but he was not the kind of guy who would confront anybody and say it.”

Teammates saw how Havlicek fit in seamlessly to the Celtics tradition from the start, working and working until he sprung free. They saw how he grew into one of the best all-around players ever. Havlicek could slide from the guard spot to the forward position. He could handle all types of defensive assignments. He starred as a sixth man, becoming synonymous with that role, before stepping into the starting lineup and handling whatever else the Celtics needed. He wasn’t highly regarded as a shooter early in his career but left the NBA in second place on the all-time career playoff scoring list. Havlicek has since dropped to 13th on that list but still leads the Celtics in all-time points scored with 26,395.

“And he was a very good defender,” Cowens said. “I mean, John was not a slouch. He liked to beat up on people. He was very physical, but he was slick about it. He wasn’t like me just going out there and beating on people. He was slick about it with the holding and the grabbing and the different things.”

Teammates believe Havlicek could have succeeded in anything. He excelled as a businessman and owner of three Wendy’s franchises. But he chose basketball first. Or, considering his tryout with the Browns, maybe basketball chose him. Whatever the case, Boston struck it big with the ninth pick of the 1962 NBA Draft. Havlicek fortified those teams with Russell and gave the Celtics a chance to fight back to the championship circle again after the big man left.

When the game got close and everyone else showed signs of fatigue, teammates knew they could always count on Havlicek.

“He worked at making things happen on the court,” Sanders said. “He couldn’t understand if people were not as focused as he was. And particularly late in the game. Late in the game, a lot of the rest of us normal people were beginning to have problems with our stamina. And John, of course, he was as fresh as he was in the beginning.”

Havlicek played more NBA games than anyone before him. During his final game, after a long-standing ovation, he piled up 29 points, nine assists and five rebounds. One day after his 38th birthday, he sprinted the left lane for a fast-break bucket. He raced around a screen to free himself for a jumper. He beat everyone in transition for a reverse layup, hustled back to contest a shot perfectly, beat everyone in transition again, then dove on the floor for a loose ball. Havlicek played 41 minutes that day. He scored nine points over the final three of those.

Through snow and everything else, he was always willing to run.

Career stats: G: 1,270 Pts.: 20.8, Reb.: 6.3, Ast.: 4.8, FG%: 43.9, FT%: 83.5, Win Shares: 131.7, PER: 17.5

The AthleticNBA 75 Panel points: 669 | Hollinger GOAT Points: 151.5

Achievements: 11-time All-NBA, 13-time All-Star, NBA champ (’63, ’64, ’65, ’66, ’68, ’69, ’74, ’76), Finals MVP (’74), Hall of Fame (’84), NBA 35th Anniversary Team (’81), NBA at 50 (’96), NBA 75th Anniversary team (’21)

(Illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; Bettmann / Getty Images)